The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  By contrast Laurence Duggan of the State Department, who was handled by Itzhak Akhmerov, did the business for love. In October 1939, State’s security officers warned him that his loyalty was being questioned, but they had no inkling of the magnitude of his treachery, and after a cursory investigation he was allowed to keep his job, becoming a personal adviser on Latin America to Cordell Hull. In July 1944 Duggan resigned from State and joined the UN relief agency UNRRA. Four years later, after being questioned by the FBI he jumped from the sixteenth floor of his office building, but even then the authorities were oblivious of the importance of his NKVD role, revealed only by the 1990 opening of a Moscow archive. Arthur Schlesinger, who knew and liked Duggan, wrote long after: ‘One wonders what impulses of idealism may have inextricably entangled this decent man with the harsh machinations of Stalinist tyranny.’ Some of those who spied for Moscow remained unidentified. ‘C-11’, a woman source in the Navy Department, ceased providing information in the summer of 1940, when threatened with exposure. Another American woman, codenamed ‘Zero’, who worked for a Senate committee and passed on reports from the US commercial attaché in Berlin, sought work in the State Department but was rejected, partly because it was reluctant to employ Jews. She nonetheless secured transcripts of Cordell Hull’s conversations with foreign ambassadors.

  The Soviets also had plenty of duds on their payroll. Martha Dodd, daughter of America’s 1933–38 Berlin ambassador, was recruited by the NKVD’s Boris Vinogradov, with whom she fell desperately in love. Even by Soviet standards, Centre’s manipulation of their relationship touched extremes: hours before his execution during the Purges, Vinogradov was persuaded to write a letter to Dodd, urging her to keep spying in expectation of being reunited with him. His death was concealed from her, and she sustained contact with her handlers through the war years. An NKVD report asserted contemptuously: ‘She considers herself a Communist and claims to accept the Party’s program. In reality, however, “Liza” is a typical representative of American Bohemia, a sexually decayed woman ready to sleep with any handsome man.’ Moscow was in exceptionally credulous mood when it gave Dodd’s brother William $3,000 to help him buy a small newspaper, the Blue Ridge Herald. By 1945 he was working in the New York office of the TASS news agency, run by the NKVD station chief, and was under unsurprisingly close FBI surveillance. Moscow gained nothing from the Dodds after their father left the Berlin embassy.

  Michael Straight was another Russian failure, a rich young American recruited by the NKVD’s London station chief Theodore Maly, supposedly acting for the Comintern. His subsequent handler, Arnold Deutsch, dismissed Straight as a dilettante with more money than sense, who once wrote a cheque for £500 to help fund the communist newspaper the Daily Worker. On the young idealist’s return to the US, he secured a job with the State Department. When the NKVD’s Washington station expressed scepticism about his value, Moscow Centre cautioned sternly: ‘Straight is prospectively a big agent, and burning him … is not our intention.’ The Nazi–Soviet Pact caused Straight to resign from the State Department – and from the NKVD. He never, however, revealed the knowledge he had acquired in London about the treachery of Blunt and Burgess. The Russians, cynically and perhaps correctly, believed that this was not out of loyalty to the renegades, but because the fate of Ignatz Reiss showed what happened to those who betrayed Centre or its agents.

  Since the United States is a nation of immigrants, it was impossible to monitor a host of such citizens as Boris Morros, born in St Petersburg in 1891, who became a minor-league Hollywood director-producer. The NKVD recruited him in 1934, chiefly to provide cover for other agents rather than as a source of information. Morros had three brothers still in the Soviet Union: one was executed after incurring the displeasure of the Party, but his own NKVD role enabled him to save the lives of the other two. In 1944 Vasily Zarubin drove Morros to meet Martha Dodd and her rich husband Alfred Stern, whom he persuaded to invest $130,000 in the producer’s music publishing business. This not only proved a poor investment for Stern, but also a waste of effort for the NKVD, who got little or nothing of value from Morros before he was belatedly ‘turned’ by the FBI in 1945. Likewise ‘Leo’, a freelance journalist, proved a conman who invented intelligence for cash, as did New York congressman Samuel Dickstein, born a Lithuanian and contemptuously codenamed ‘Crook’, who nonetheless received $12,000 of Soviet funds before Moscow decided he was not worth any more money. The only significant service Dickstein performed was to secure a US passport for an Austrian NKVD agent. He died in 1954, aged seventy, a justice of the New York Supreme Court whose work for the Soviets was unrevealed.

  Moscow was as vulnerable to such unrewarding sources as every other intelligence service, but it could also boast superb ones. Alger Hiss of the State Department, recruited by the GRU in 1935, was born in 1904 into a prominent Baltimore family. He suffered a childhood tragedy when his father committed suicide, but became a brilliant student at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law School. His wife, New York writer Priscilla Fansler, was an eager accomplice in his espionage activities. In August 1939 Hiss was denounced to assistant secretary of state Adolph Berle by Whittaker Chambers, a former fellow-comrade. The spy nonetheless kept his nerve, and his job. The Comintern’s resident hitman Otto Katz explored the merits of killing Chambers, and was deflected only by the intended victim’s warning that he had concealed documents which would critically damage Soviet interests in the US if anything happened to him. In 1941, both Hiss’s friend Dean Acheson and his mentor Felix Frankfurter assured the young man they had complete faith in him. Such was the reluctance to believe ill of this brilliant diplomat that he rose onward and upward in the State Department, serving with the US delegation at the 1945 Yalta conference.

  Before every major Allied summit of the war, the NKVD briefed the Soviet politburo about the members of the American and British delegations and – in Pavel Sudoplatov’s smug words – ‘indicated whether they were under our control as agents’. This was a gross implicit exaggeration: only three or four senior American and British diplomats were Soviet sources. But it was indisputably true that, thanks to Stalin’s wellwishers in Washington and London, he entered every summit comprehensively informed about the policy positions of his fellow-warlords. If this helped little towards achieving victory over the Axis, it contributed significantly to securing Russia’s objectives in the post-war settlement.

  Sudoplatov believed that when Hiss briefed the Russians, he was acting at the behest of Roosevelt’s aide Harry Hopkins. Hopkins certainly provided important information to Moscow. He warned the Soviet embassy that the FBI had bugged a meeting at which an NKVD officer passed cash to an American communist. He almost certainly briefed Centre’s agents about the substance of the Roosevelt–Churchill bilateral summits, and probably about much more. This should not imply, however, that the prominent New Dealer was consciously betraying America’s secrets to an enemy; rather, he was committed to seeking a working collaboration between the US and the Soviet Union. He thought, as did his master Franklin Roosevelt, that a parade of trust was an important tool towards achieving this. Hopkins said without embarrassment: ‘Since Russia is the decisive factor in the war she must be given every assistance and every effort must be made to obtain her friendship.’ The relatively confiding attitude of himself and some other prominent administration figures towards the Russians helped to make subordinates feel justified in going much further, betraying undoubted secrets.

  Russian-born William Weisband, a known post-war Soviet source, served in wartime US Army signals intelligence, latterly at Arlington Hall, and is believed to have passed information from an early stage. The OSS was awash with Moscow informants. Karl Marzani worked in the graphics department, Julius Joseph in the Far East section. Other staffers serving two masters included Bella Joseph, Donald Wheeler, Jane Zlatowsky, Horst Berensprung, Helen Tennei, George Wuchinich, Leonard Mintz. The NKVD’s OSS informants provided far more material than Centre’s five-man US desk c
ould translate. The Latin American division was headed by a former University of Oklahoma professor named Maurice Halperin, who kept a copy of the Daily Worker conspicuously on his desk, submitted reports in strict accordance with the Party’s line, and worked tirelessly to promote its interests in the countries within his sphere. He was less successful, however, in winning plaudits from Centre, who thought little of his material. Franz Neumann, an economist in the German section, received higher marks for passing on a voluminous American study of the Soviet economy. Noel Field, who provided some assistance to Allen Dulles in Bern while Europe was occupied, in 1945 sought to promote a Party agenda through OSS. Arthur Schlesinger wrote: ‘Field was a Quaker Communist, filled with idealism, smugness and sacrifice. What struck me most was his self-righteous evasiveness … He sought nothing more than a life of pious devotion on the other side of the Iron Curtain.’

  Julius Joseph and his wife Bella became prime Moscow sources on US policy towards China, Japan and Korea. Even following the couple’s acrimonious divorce, so strong was her loyalty to the Soviets that she did not expose Julius. Donald Wheeler’s NKVD handler wrote that ‘he treats his OSS colleagues very critically, and considers all empty-headed’. Wheeler took pride in his own contempt for the risk of exposure, saying, ‘It makes no sense to be afraid: a man dies only once.’ He passed to the Soviets all OSS analytical material on Germany, and – far more dangerously – identified Donovan’s agents in Europe, including some who were operating undercover. After the German defeat, Wheeler fingered a US Airborne officer who was engaged on a secret mission in the Soviet Zone of occupation, to report on the Russians’ removals of industrial plant.

  Arthur Schlesinger said: ‘Donovan knew about some OSS communists but not perhaps about others.’ The general shrugged: ‘I’d put Stalin on the OSS payroll, if I thought it would help us defeat Hitler.’ It is nonetheless hard to believe he was aware that his own personal assistant was a Soviet informant. Duncan Lee provided a stream of strategic insights, though the US government would have given some of these to the Russians through open channels, for example Lee’s March 1944 warning that D-Day had been delayed until June. He did better service for Centre by warning its agents about security probes, including one on Donald Wheeler. Late in 1944 Lee started a love affair with his ex-NKVD courier Mary Wolfe Price, secretary to the great journalist Walter Lippmann and thus herself a conduit for many privileged confidences. This thoroughly annoyed Centre, because it shifted his priorities. On 3 February 1945 the NKVD’s Joseph Katz reported to Moscow: ‘Saw Lee last night. After beating his chest about what a coward he is, how sorry he feels about it, etc., he told me he must stick to his decision to quit … In my opinion there is no sense in using him. He is totally frightened and depressed. He suffers from nightmares where he sees his name on lists.’ Katz had two more meetings with Lee, whose nerves were so shredded that his hands shook. They would have shaken even more had he known that his Soviet visitor – not to be confused with his namesake Otto, also a killer – had personally liquidated several informants whose loyalty was suspect. Lee, however, was allowed to survive. In April 1945 the NKVD simply broke off contact with him.

  On 25 November 1943, a fifty-four-year-old Russian Jew named Jacob Golos died of a heart attack in his New York apartment. This caused passionate grief to his lover of five years’ standing, Elizabeth Bentley – and to Moscow Centre, whose foremost American network-runner he then was. Golos had fled his homeland as a Bolshevik back in 1910, joined the US Communist Party, then gone home to share the heady joys of Revolution. Later, however, he abandoned a wife and son in the Soviet Union to return to America as an intelligence officer. He became a US citizen, and in 1938 took up with Bentley, a strapping thirty-year-old ex-Vassar girl with a weakness for left-wing causes and unusual foreign men. Golos was busy training her in the arts of intelligence work when he himself was arrested as a spy – hardly surprising, since he was a close friend of Party leader Earl Browder. But he escaped with a short sentence, and – amazingly – felt able to resume his activities.

  Golos recruited his friend Nathan Silvermaster, a veteran communist who became Moscow’s most important American connection, and in turn secured the services of Harry Dexter White – ‘Lawyer’ – and other key Washington sources. Julius Rosenberg, much later sent to the electric chair, first gave information to Golos. Cedric Belfrage, a British journalist working for Sir William Stephenson in New York, was another useful contact. Joseph Gregg, an official who moved to the State Department in 1944, provided information about the US Army and Navy, and also forwarded FBI reports on communist activity in Central and South America. A significant number of the network’s informants have never been identified. In 1943 a communist codenamed ‘Buck’ and working in UNRRA, who reported first to Golos then to Silvermaster, passed on a sixty-five-page report on the US machinery industry, then in late June 1945 provided an agenda for US positions at Potsdam. ‘Arena’ had access to information from the Pentagon’s military intelligence department, where his wife worked.

  From 1940 onwards, Golos was obliged to subject himself to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and soon thereafter to FBI surveillance. None of this inhibited him in sustaining his NKVD career, using Elizabeth Bentley – ‘Umnitsa’ – to make his contacts. His employers were highly nervous about him, however, and made repeated attempts to persuade him to return home, very likely for execution. Golos not merely refused these demands, shrugging that he could not get a passport, but made sure Centre knew that he had taken out, or rather hidden, a life insurance policy: a sealed envelope containing details of Moscow’s operations in the US. The Soviets were equally unsuccessful in persuading him to turn over his sources to other US NKVD stations. Golos told Bentley that no other Russian in the US understood Americans as he did. Then he heard that back home his son had joined the Red Army, and talked of wanting to join him. He took the considerable risk of travelling to Washington to meet Vasily Zarubin, to whom he complained bitterly about being asked to transfer his sources.

  Then, suddenly, he was dead. Amidst her grief, Elizabeth Bentley remained cool enough to destroy the sealed envelope in a safe deposit, which contained the secrets with which Golos had shielded himself against a visit from Moscow’s executioners. Itzhak Akhmerov assumed responsibility for handling her, and assured Centre that Bentley, whom he liked, was ‘one hundred per cent our woman’. But Moscow remained uneasy, especially as her alcohol consumption rose. She showed growing signs of strain, and wailed that she needed a man in her life. Eventually, under pressure from Akhmerov, she turned over to him Nathan Silvermaster and thus his group.

  Silvermaster was born in Odessa in 1898, emigrated to the West Coast in 1914, and was for years an active US Communist Party member before taking a job at the US Treasury. There, in Moscow’s interests he forged links with a string of fellow-sympathisers, some of whom became black-comically muddled about their allegiances. Frank Coe, for instance, complained that his workload as a Soviet agent was hampering his career at the Treasury. Silvermaster’s sources produced material from all over Washington. There was data on military-equipment procurement programmes and the views of policy-makers, which probably came from Harry Dexter White, a senior economist at the Treasury. June 1941 brought reports on the Wehrmacht from the office of the US military attaché in London. Moscow learned on 5 August that at a 31 July Washington lunch, navy secretary Frank Knox bet against Morgenthau of the Treasury that Hitler would have Moscow and Leningrad inside a month. Harry Hopkins’s report to the White House on his summer 1941 visit to Moscow was also passed to Centre, together with a note on the US cabinet’s discussion of Averell Harriman’s mission to the Soviet Union.

  Intriguing though all this gossip was – and Stalin himself read some of the Silvermaster material – the NKVD wanted more. In 1942 the Washington station was told to brief its man to discover whether the US was fulfilling its Lend-Lease promises, and if not to identify those members of the administration who blocked prog
ress. What were American intentions about opening a second front? What were the administration’s views about post-war frontiers, especially those of the Soviet Union? Was there any evidence of fifth-column sabotage in the US? Centre also sought more detail on policy discussions. Its highest priority was to penetrate the White House and to secure information from Hopkins and Morgenthau, because of their intimacy with the president.

  Meanwhile, Centre was receiving government material from Robert Miller, Charles Flato, Harold Glasser, Victor Perlo, Charles Kramer, John Abt. Harry Magdoff, a statistician at the Department of War Production, delivered a stream of data on weapons output. It is surprising that Moscow did not run out of codenames for its American sources; there were so many that it became not unusual for them to run into each other in the course of their official duties, sometimes with knowledge of shared disloyalties. Field, Duggan and Straight crossed paths. Accredited diplomat and covert NKVD handler Anatoly Gorsky found himself in the US Treasury Department one day in December 1944, to receive a trivial briefing about German postage stamps. He was directed first to the office of Harry Dexter White, and then – in White’s absence – to that of Harold Glasser. Both men were Soviet agents: White protected Glasser from a security inquiry about his communist links, though the two men’s personal relationship became strained when their wives quarrelled. Glasser considered it prudent to reject an offered post on the top deck of the State Department, because he would be unlikely to survive the security checks the appointment required. He was nonetheless able to provide Moscow with important cables about US post-war policy planning, including details of Washington’s views on financial aid to Russia. In an ambitious moment, Vasily Zarubin sought to target Ernest Hemingway as an informant, though he suspected him of being a Trotskyite rather than a Stalinist. In any event, the wayward writer showed no enthusiasm.